Google Labs contains all sorts of creative and useful additions that we can plug into Gmail. Several of these are “must have” addition in my opinion.
These two add-ons can save you time every day, but more importantly they deal with “senders remorse” that awful moment when you hit send on an email and immediately regret it!... Read More …

Most of us struggle on a daily basis to stay on top of our email. The relentless flow of messages coming into your inbox can overwhelm even the most organized individual.
Many of my friends and colleagues of recommended that I take a good close look at Sanebox, and for good reason. This application is widely regarded as one of the truly outstanding organizational tools available, to help master and control your inbox. Sanebox works ... Read More …

Choosing a good to-do list, or task manager, can be a daunting task. There are so many to choose from, from the simple and elegant, such as WunderList, two full-blown project management tools.
One great addition to the lineup is Asana, an online task manager for teams. Asana is free, for up to 30 teammates. These teammates can be within or outside of your company. It provides a shared task manager that has a wealth ... Read More …

Inbox overload is one of the major challenges we all face in dealing with our personal productivity. Whether you experience 50 to 60 emails per day or five or 600 emails in a day, quickly being able to sort through what’s important and what’s not is crucial to productivity.
Google has incorporated what they consider to be the ideal pre-sorting system by incorporating a tabbed inbox into Gmail.
Pre-sorting your email into normal conversations, social-media ... Read More …

Meeting mismanagement is unfortunately the rule, rather than the exception, Meeting Chaos tends to rule the day.
Am I being unfair? Perhaps, but I have sat through enough meetings that had poor or no agendas, rambled off topic, and did not produce tangible outcomes to believe that as a rule, meeting are major time-wasters.
Less Meeting is a web-based solution that may be the ticket to more productive and less time-consuming meetings.
Less Meeting can ... Read More …

A growing number of people rely on Evernote for Everything. it has become the heart of their personal productivity system. One glaring omission in earlier versions of Evernote has been the lack of a reminders feature, which severely limited Evernote’s functionality as a task-list manager. No more; Evernote has reminders now, so with much excitement and anticipation (it’s the small things) I dive into Evernote reminders in this short and moving video.
Steve Dotto ... Read More …

I have no idea how much time I used to waste each day correcting small typing mistakes. I am a bit of a hunt and peck typist, although I do plow through at a fairly decent rate I tend to make the same mistakes over and over again. There are many regular spelling mistakes I tend to make (credit where credit is due, Catholic Boys School!) But more often my mistakes tend to be transposed ... Read More …

A fascinating little story today from Fast Company on how dropping the thermostat to save on the heating bill is a big mistake.
When temperatures dropped to 68 degrees fahrenheit:
– Employees made 44 per cent more errors than when temperatures were 77 degrees, in a Cornell University study.
– Employees were also half as productive.
– The drop in performance cost employers 10 per cent more per hour, per employee.
– People were cold ... Read More …

Having just returned from an early summer vacation, I know how difficult it can be to retrain my fuzzy brain to think about serious work and not TomKat’s divorce scandal.
Fortunately, Chip Averwater, an American retailer and author on issues of business leadership, assures me this adjustment phase is completely normal and that my bosses would do well to coddle me (my words, not his) a little as I gradually come back down to reality.... Read More …

TD Economics has come out with an interesting report predicting provincial growth for the period 2016 to 2021. The report looks at two components of growth: the growth in the labour supply and the gains in productivity.
In British Columbia, for the years 1990 to 2007, the labour supply grew 1.7 per cent and productivity increased 1.0 per cent pushing growth per year to 2.7 per cent. While this was good relative to the rest ... Read More …

A timely tip list from workplace performance expert and author Jason Womack on the subject of overcoming overload and working smarter in 2012.
These may be of particular interest to those of you lucky to have time off over the holidays, only to return to the office in the New Year to a mountain of urgent emails and a gut filled with dread.
“Death by to-do list” syndrome.
But Womack says it doesn’t have to ... Read More …

Investment in B.C. — a key factor in the low productivity that makes the province a chronic laggard in income growth — has improved somewhat over the decade, but it still trails major competitors, according to a new study from the C.D. Howe Institute.
A separate analysis of incomes in B.C. done by the Business Council of British Columbia shows the province as only “a middling performer” within Canada according to most measures of income.... Read More …